Varvel: What causes mass shootings and how we stop them

A Florida judge has ordered that the suspect in a deadly shooting at a high school will be held without bond on 17 counts of murder. 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz was wearing an orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed during the Thursday hearing. (Feb. 15)
AP

The heart of the problem is a problem with the heart.

Students bow their heads in prayer along with the crowd during the community prayer vigil for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victims on Thursday, Feb. 15 at Parkridge Church in Coral Springs.(Photo: ERIC HASERT/TCPALM)

“How many times is this going to go on until the American people say enough is enough?” Florida Sen. Bill Nelson asked in response to the latest school shooting in Parkland, Fla., where 17 died.

Well, American citizens are saying “enough is enough.” In fact, Americans are sick and tired and angry, and we want it to stop.

But it hasn't.

National Review’s David French said, “Consider this, 15 of the 20 worst mass shootings in U.S. history have occurred since the Columbine school shooting in 1999. The five worst have all occurred since 2007, and three of those five were in 2016 and 2017.”

This violence didn't occur when I was growing up. So what is causing it? I have three theories.

In his farewell address, George Washington said, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

America is seeing the consequences of a lack of national morality because we have turned our backs on God.

Just look at what happened in schools. From 1940 to 1962, the top complaints from school teachers were: students talking in class, chewing gum and running in the halls. Since 1963 to the present, school officials have dealt with rape, robbery, assault and shootings.

So what happened in 1963?

“One can argue, and some have, that the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court – in a series of three decisions back in 1962 and 1963 – to remove Bible and prayer from our public schools, may be the most spiritually significant event in our nation’s history over the course of the last 55 years,” said William Jeynes, a professor of education at California State University, Long Beach, and senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.

“One of the indications that American society has paid a costly price for the removal of prayer and moral education from the schools is that school shootings have regularly emerged on the American scene,” said Jeynes in his book, "Christianity, Education and Modern Society."

I propose that we teach civics again — teach principles like love, forgiveness and the golden rule. Listen, ones does not have to be a Christian to teach virtue.

Second: America has a violence problem.

It's simply a case of garbage in, garbage out. Children witness so much violence in movies and video games that they become morally desensitized. Is it no wonder why some of them act out.

“None of these extreme acts, like a school shooting, occurs because of only one risk factor; there are many factors, including feeling socially isolated, being bullied, and so on,” Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University, told the New York Times. “But if you look at the literature, I think it’s clear that violent media is one factor; it’s not the largest factor, but it’s also not the smallest.”

Just as parents and guardians won't allow their children to ingest poison, I propose that they turn off the violent entertainment.

Third: America has an Isolation problem.

Children need personal relationships with loving adults, especially their parents. Social media makes it possible for children to develop a separate world online. Adult family members must monitor what they're doing at all times.

Fortunately, the day before the Parkland massacre, a grandmother in Everett, Wash. did just that. After reading her grandson's journal she called the police. According to officers, the student wrote that he couldn’t “wait to walk into that class and blow all those (expletives) away.” He also wrote that he had learned from other mass school shootings and wanted to make the body count as high as possible. The 18-year-old student was arrested.

This grandmother's actions saved the school and herself the grief that Sue Kleibold suffers every day.

Kleibold whose son Dylan, 17, went on a shooting rampage with his friend Eric Harris, 18, at their high school in Colorado in 1999, says she still thinks about the victims every day.

Klebold can't forgive herself for not realizing something was wrong.

“You go back over every conversation, every gift, every moment, and what you feel is self-loathing,” she told the Guardian. “I let this happen; it was my role to keep him safe, and to keep others safe, too, and somehow this happened because of me, because I wasn’t able to stop it. The guilt one feels doesn’t fit in a room, it’s so huge."

Look, I admit that thoughts and prayers are not enough in the wake of another tragedy. But passing new gun laws is not enough either. This is a spiritual problem that needs a spiritual solution.

So I propose we take Washington's advice by reintroducing religion and morality. Let's make America moral again.

Contact Varvel at gary.varvel@indystar.com. Friend him on Facebook at Gary Varvel and follow him on Twitter: @varvel.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012. Twenty children and 6 adults were killed. Before going to the school the shooter killed his mother. The shooting spree ended when the killer committed suicide.
Gary Varvel

On July 20, 2012, 12 people were killed and 70 injured when a mass shooting occurred inside a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises.
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Dylann Roof confessed to murdering nine black people during a Bible study on June 17, 2015, but says he "almost didn't go through with it because everyone was so nice to him." The roots of racism obviously run very deep within Roof.
Gary Varvel